Free App to Color Grade Your Images on Mobile Using LUTs

Are you sick of seeing the same VSCO filters applied to everyone’s content on Instagram? Then differentiate yourself with this free app that relies on LUTs to edit your images.

3D LUT Creator has made a name for itself in the photography industry as one of the go-to tools for advanced color work. It’s a fantastic app to create your own LUTs or make drastic changes that would require a lot more work with any other solution, primarily when working on a series that comprise still images and videography.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to use my LUTs on my mobile device but never found a way to make it easy. Well, this just changed as 3D LUT now exists as a mobile app. It’s entirely free; it doesn’t have any pop-ups or ads. Currently you can adjust basic settings such as brightness, contrast, white balance, tint, and saturation. In the above video others settings such as blackpoint, texture, sharpen, noise, and tone mapping are mentioned, but they don’t seem to be yet available. Hopefully, they’ll come soon to compete even better with other photo editing apps.

3D LUT Mobile includes over 70 LUTs for free and more should be added in the future. A cloud exists to download even more LUTs, but it's not available just yet. It will probably be made available with version 1.48 of 3D LUT Creator which will also allow you to upload your own LUTs to then use on your mobile device.

As you can see, there are a couple of things that are lacking compared to what’s announced. But I’m sure it’ll all be good within a couple of days or weeks. For now, the mobile app is totally free, offers over 70 LUTs to give your images a specific style, and it’s easy to use. There's no reason not to download it and see how it’s going to evolve with time. I’m personally very excited, and I hope the app will soon include the possibility of grading videos as well, just like VSCO does.

3D LUT Mobile is currently available for free for both iOS and Android. For more information, visit 3D LUT Creator's website where you'll also find the desktop software available for 20 percent off.

Quentin Decaillet's picture

Quentin Décaillet is a photographer and retoucher based in Switzerland specializing in portrait and wedding photography.

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2 Comments

Perhaps I'm too 'old school' but I don't understand the fascination with color grading. Most work looks much too processed today. What's wrong with just shooting images you like, making the basic panel LR adjustments and leave it at that? Instagram landscape feeds all look like they've been run thru multiple the same filters. They all dazzle, but it's becoming tedious.

I understand your point and some people do that.

The thing is, some people like to colour grade to give some mood to their images/videos, you can try to colour grade an image with differents style and you will see how different is the message it gives using one or the other.

Another point, is to make your photography consistent and different from everybody else, sadly, some people rely to much on this and don't develop their own style while they prefer to copy other's.